BILLION-DOLLAR MEGA MILLIONS TICKET SOLD IN MICHIGAN

Prize is third-largest lottery jackpot in the United States

The winning ticket for a $1 billion jackpot, the thirdbiggest lottery prize in U.S. history, was sold at a Michigan grocery store, according to state lottery officials.

The winning numbers, which were drawn Friday night, were picked by a customer at a Kroger grocery store in Novi, a city of about 60,000 people, 30 miles northwest of Detroit.

“Someone in Michigan woke up to life-changing news this morning, and Kroger Michigan congratulates the newest Michigan multimillionaire,” said Rachel Hurst, a regional spokeswoman for the grocery chain. She declined to comment further.

State lottery officials said the identity of the winner will not be known until the person contacts them.

The winner can choose to collect the prize through an initial payment and then annual payments for 29 years, or receive a one-time cash payment of about $739 million. In that case, the winner would get about $530 million, after taxes, state lottery officials said.

The odds of winning the jackpot were 1 in 302,575,350, according to Mega Millions. The winning numbers in the Mega Millions lottery were 4, 26, 42, 50 and 60, with a Mega Ball number of 24.

Two days earlier, a separate $731 million Powerball jackpot hit. That winning ticket was sold at Coney Market, a convenience store in the down-on-its-luck former mining town of Lonaconing in northwest Maryland.

The mayor of Novi, Bob Gatt, said the news came a month after the city was named “the second-most innovative city in the country” by Entrepreneur magazine.

He described Novi as a rapidly growing city that had once been a rural outpost of Detroit but was now a hub of car manufacturing that was attracting tech companies like Google.

Gatt said he was “ecstatic” for the winner. “I’d be better if I had the winning ticket,” he said.

Michigan Lottery spokesman Jake Harris said the ticket holder should sign the back and keep it in a safe place.

“I wouldn’t be surprised if the winning ticket holder held onto that ticket for a little bit, got their affairs in order, put together a financial plan and then reached out to contact us,” he said.

The jackpot was the second-largest prize in the history of Mega Millions.

In 2018, a person who chose to remain anonymous won $1.537 billion in South Carolina. That prize remains the world’s largest lottery prize ever awarded on a single ticket, according to Mega Millions.

The biggest lottery prize ever awarded in the United States was a $1.586 billion Powerball jackpot in 2016, according to The Associated Press. It was divided among three ticket winners in California, Florida and Tennessee.

A lingering mythology holds that the winners of big jackpots become cursed after their strokes of good fortune. There are numerous accounts of winners who, unequipped to manage their newfound wealth, go on to struggle with drugs or alcohol, ruined relationships and insolvency.

While one influential study in 1978 found that lottery winners were not any happier than their neighbors or more optimistic about the future, other studies have countered the notion of the so-called lottery curse.

The studies suggest that the winners’ general psychological well-being bounces back over time.

In 2018, a New Hampshire woman filed a lawsuit to keep her name from being released to the public after she won $560 million in the Powerball lottery.

Lawyers for the woman, who called herself Jane Doe in the lawsuit, said she wished to use a portion of her winnings for charity “far from the glare and misfortune that has often fallen upon other lottery ‘winners.’”

A judge allowed her to remain anonymous.